JOHN PAUL JONES
(1747 – 1792)
CAPTAIN JONES

Flat-Broke Films and Stick Around Films are researching the famous 18th Century Scottish born mariner who took many naval vessels into battle in the seas around Great Britain and the World. He was regarded as a “Great Captain” of his time and was involved in many famous sea battles. So there are endless stories to tell which could easily result in a feature film followed by a TV series.

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JOHN PAUL JONES, at sea and in the heat of battle, was a great American hero of the Age of Sail. He was to history what Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless, indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, “in harm’s way.” A minute-by- minute re-creation by novelist Evan Thomas in his book “John Paul Jones – Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy” explains the bloodbath between Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and the British man-of-war Sempis off the coast of England on an autumn night in 1779, as a gripping sea battle.

Jones’s correspondence with some of the most significant figures of the American Revolution – John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, teaches us that it took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of personal glory as well as high-minded principle, to break free of the past and start a new world. Jones’s spirit was classically American.

JOHN PAUL was his real name which he inherited with a chip on his shoulder from his father John Paul Sr. who was a proud and talented man, and today he would have been called a landscape architect. In eighteenth-century Scotland, he was a gardener who had been hired to lay out the gardens at Arbigland, a 1,400-acre estate in the wild beautiful countryside that borders the Firth of Solway. This body of water divides England and Scotland on Britain’s west coast. As a little boy, John Paul Jr. wandered in a man-made enchanted forest that would suddenly and breathtakingly open to the sea. It is easy to understand how John Paul Jr. formed the softer sensibility that inspired the romantic poetry and “fine feelings” he later espoused.

From the day of his birth, 6th July 1747, John Paul Jr. lived with his brother, three sisters, and both parents in a tidy, two-room cottage which overlooked a magnificent vista of fields running down to the Firth of Forth. Playing on the shoreline he would watch the great ships slipping down the firth to the Irish Sea beyond, bound for distant lands. Later he would join the Royal Navy and sign on as an apprentice aboard a merchant ship hoping to rise to an ordinary seaman after seven years.

In 1760, when John Paul turned thirteen, he boarded a two-masted brig The Friendship out of Whitehaven, British port across the Solway where he would return eighteen years later as an American naval officer intending to burn the place. Overcoming his first real taste of sea sickness and gaining his sea-legs, his thirty odd years at sea began with many an adventure to recall........!